Review: two new books on Swift and literature

Invisible Strings and Taylor Swift by the Book

Hi everyone!

I’ve had the chance to read two books on Swift and literature coming out now and want to let you know about them.

Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, ed. Kirstie Frederick Daugherty

The one hundred and thirteen poets contributing new writing to this book are each tasked with responding to a Taylor Swift song. But as a whole, and despite a title that gestures at a different song from folklore, this book seems to task itself with responding to Swift’s “the lakes,” in which Swift reflects on her work’s connection to Romantic poetry. “the lakes” permits, even actively encourages, the digging up of poetic intertexts (even as the song’s speaker swoons around romantically complaining about all the attention). A line from the song is even quoted at the end of Kirstie Frederick Daugherty’s introduction as if to present the book itself as the Lake District, a landscape full of poetry to which we are all invited to travel. But the book’s genius is that it turns the conceit of “the lakes” around, making Swift the original that these many contemporary poets are responding to. The poets each write one poem in response to one song, poems that are then, Daugherty coyly notes, arranged both to suggest their source material and, when it seems too easy to guess, to obscure it. In other words, we are being manipulated like puppets on invisible strings at the same time as we are being encouraged to do detailed textual exegesis, which is a comfortingly familiar situation for Swifties.

I found the actual job of figuring out the Swiftian source texts surprisingly difficult, maybe because I have a terrible memory but also because a lot of the poems sound the same, in the way that Swift’s songs often sound the same. (This is by no means a criticism: I found myself thinking about the way in which Swift uses the similarities between her songs to build meaning, repeating certain words and phrases to undermine or underline her points). I figured out halfway through that it is not specified that no song is ever repeated, and then I reread the introduction and found that this is strongly implied. I thought several of the poems were rewriting “the lakes,” but maybe I thought this more out of a sense of recognition that many of them were about how it feels to be strongly influenced by something than because it was actually true.

My favorite poems in here were “The Williams” by Naomi Shihab Nye (which I do think is actually about “the lakes”), “Seer” by A.E. Stallings, and “Of Flight” by Ilya Kaminsky. I liked other ones but forgot to mark the pages because I was turning them so intently. This book makes me feel intense hope about what it means to be obsessed with the idea of Taylor Swift as a literary figure, like that’s something meaningful, generative, and profound. Which it is, but you don’t always feel that way (i.e. when you’re deep into writing a book on the subject, which has its ups and downs). Not to be all Swiftian and quote poetry, but there’s a Robert Frost poem in which the speaker stares into a well straining to see something other than his own “godlike” face on the surface of the water - like Swift in the Lake District finding traces of something other than herself - and finally succeeds in seeing “for once, then, something.” And that’s kind of how I felt about this book: that it’s giving us “for once, then, something.”

Invisible Strings is published by Ballantine Books, forthcoming December 3rd.

I received an ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Taylor Swift by the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics, from Fairy Tales to Tortured Poets, Rachel Feder and Tiffany Tatreau

It’s a useful step on the way to establishing literary Taylor Swift studies to agree on all the places where Swift seems to be reworking other texts - if only because we don’t all want to reinvent the wheel every time we try to write about Swift and literature. And Swift does very earnestly and deliberately rework texts. For example, “happiness” quotes lines from different parts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Insofar as it attempts to exhaustively document the ways in which you could understand different lines in Swift’s songs as allusions to literature, this book is useful. (Although not more useful than Sir Jonathan Bate’s introduction to Invisible Strings, which discusses Swift’s major moments of quotation from classic literature in a pithier and more cohesive manner). But it’s less useful in explaining why it matters that Swift is thinking about her relationship to the work of writers such as Fitzgerald.

The book is organized around “eras” (probably the wrong word, but I see what they did there) assigned to different Swift albums: these are Bildungsroman (Taylor Swift), Fairy Tale (Fearless and Speak Now), Modernist (Red and 1989), Decadent (reputation), Sentimentalist (Lover), Romantic (folklore and evermore), Gothic (Midnights), and Postmodernist (TTPD). There are also explanations of the lives and work of different “tortured poets” including obvious ones like Lord Byron and Emily Dickinson and the more obscure Edna St Vincent Millay and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as playlists of Swift songs built around different motifs.

The book is set up as a series of annotations, although sadly (at least in my ebook review copy) these are annotations without a text: the title of a song is given, followed by individual lines of interest accompanied by a note. These range from well researched explanations of how Cheshire cats came to be associated with grinning to what feels more like filler. For example, the line “we’re all bored” from New Romantics bears the annotation that “ennui” is common in modernist writing - and earlier writing…

I think the organization of the book into dubious “eras” is to blame for this. A suggestion that “This Love” could be considered The Great Gatsby “fan fiction” because of a mention of a lantern burning in the night follows another suggestion that the same song echoes a line in Samuel Beckett. But it remains unclear to me exactly what it adds to read either allusion into the song except to prove that the song does in fact fit within Swift’s modernist era, which… isn’t a thing.

As W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley argued in their foundational article “The Intentional Fallacy,” you’re the person who gets to decide what you think a text means, which includes what it seems to be alluding to, as long as you have a compelling reason for reading it that way. Because there are essentially endless allusions you could hear in any text. This reminds me of the V&A Songbook Trail I wrote about a while ago, which just plunked the Swiftian objects down in rooms with other art and asked the viewer to do the work of connecting the two things. I was desperate for some explanation from the clearly very intelligent and interesting creators of the exhibit for what they chose to do and why they chose to do it. Why are you putting Swift’s costumes in the V&A? Why next to this art in particular? Similarly: Why are you showing us allusions to classic literature in Swift’s lyrics? Why point to these connections and these authors?

This work that you can imagine someone doing has the effect of making this book feel like a worksheet, like you’re looking at the teaching materials for a really interesting lesson. The line “clink, clink” from “Slut!” is cited as an instance of “onomatopoeia.” It is not clear why this is noted, except to teach the reader what onomatopoeia is. You can imagine what you would do with this in class. Who knows what onomatopoeia is? What’s another example? Why do you think this song is trying to reproduce the sound of the world it exists in? Of course, as founders of a new field, a lot of what we are doing is imaginary work, projecting the way forward - like the speaker of “happiness,” who hasn’t met the “new me” yet and isn’t even sure whether she means by that her ex’s new girlfriend or her own healed self. We don’t know what Swift Studies looks and feels like yet. But some of that imaginary work has to be made real.

I will say in its defence that this book definitely feels intended to spur you to further effort. Lit crit words like “trope” and “onomatopoeia” are in bold to denote that you can flip forward to the glossary at the end to find their definitions. You have to actively look them up, like you have to find a text of each song’s lyrics (or listen to it or remember it). The book asks a lot of work of its reader. I genuinely think it’s good to ask the reader to do a little work.

There’s even a list of recommended reading after each “era.” But… look, included in the list for anyone who likes Speak Now is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English masterpiece “The Canterbury Tales.” This is not a terrible idea, because Speak Now, like the “Tales,” tells stories in ways that reveal its speakers to be unreliable. Clearly this book’s heart is in the right place. But on the other hand, it is a terrible idea, because trying to get someone to pick up Chaucer after reading this book because it’s kind of like Speak Now seems to me like the worst possible version of the reason you might give for pointing out Gatsby allusions in Swift’s work: because it’ll make people read Fitzgerald! Slash Chaucer! Slash Wordsworth!

I think we can start with really, carefully reading Swift.

It’s hard to do that without a definitive text. It’s not this book’s fault that it’s a bunch of annotations in search of an author. There are copyright issues around reproducing Swift’s work. I don’t blame the authors for this. But this does reinforce, to my mind, the fact that we need to establish the texts if we can hope to do good work close reading Swift. That is the essential priority of contemporary literary Swift studies or whatever this discipline is. If Swift or someone attached to her is reading this, we need the definitive lyrics! No frills, just her versions of the lyrics so we’re not poaching from Genius.com or the backs of our personal vinyl collections and hoping everyone else is reading pretty much the same texts. And then, after that, we need the equivalent to the Arden Shakespeare: dense annotations that bring together all the scholarship and list textual variants.

Anyway, skip this if you want to know more about Swift’s literary allusions, but buy it if you want a cute gift for a 12-year-old in your life. Or just cut to the chase and buy them the Riverside Chaucer.

Taylor Swift by the Book is published by Quirk Books, November 26th.

I received an ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.